Both farmers markets in Evergreen offer a bountiful harvest of small pleasures: shopping outdoors, chatting with vendors, loading up on fresh asparagus, and discovering your neighbor got downsized and is now making ecologically correct detergent or toddler pants for a living.

The Evergreen Farmer’s Market operates downtown on Mondays, and the Evergreen Farmers’ Market in the Bergen Village shopping center, which was originally founded in the parking lot of the El Rancho Walmart in 2000, is open on Tuesdays.

It’s a story as old as romance: Stinging from a recent breakup, an ordinarily passive woman lets a more gonzo friend drag her to a local honky-tonk for a little re-immersion therapy. The beer runs cold, emotions run hot, the band is smokin’, and when she spies her one-time lover burning it up on the dance floor with his new flame, things heat up fast.

In Denver area ice hockey circles, he was known simply as “the goalie in the wheelchair.”

Kyle Stubbs and his chair stopped pucks for a lot of teams over the years: the Warthogs, the Grinders, Berserk, Spitfire, and Chimney Full of Squirrels, to name a few. And he frustrated the shooters of other teams too numerous to list.

On a recent Saturday, many of us who played with and against Kyle gathered at the Promenade in Westminster to say goodbye and to remember a man who refused to accept the limits that life imposed.

About five years ago I was reading about the thousands of migrating birds killed every year by flying into windows. I had been concerned about the many birds that hit my big picture windows every year and decided I should do something about it. The article I read also told about a college student who was doing research on the problem and mentioned that a black-plastic anti-deer fabric had the best results in his tests.

Cynics who believe that, when given a chance, politicians will take the politically expedient route were dealt a blow when Gov. Bill Ritter vetoed two priority bills of organized labor after the 2009 session of the Colorado General Assembly adjourned.

Two years ago, I got a call from my friend Mark Obmascik. Mark, a former Denver Post reporter turned author, was working on a new book, and he needed help.

His previous book, called “The Big Year,” was about hard-core birders who tried to accumulate as many species sightings as they could in 365 days. It was quirky and entertaining, and compelling enough to get me into birding myself.

The studio in Aspen Park is working to become a nonprofit that will be called Peak Performance Company, according to owner Danielle Heller.

Working with local businesses and performers, Peak has raised enough money to fill out the necessary paperwork to file for 501(c)3 status from the Internal Revenue Service and is on its way to realizing its dream to offer dance scholarships and be a community-wide performance arts center.

A federal wiretapping lawsuit against former Jeffco commissioner Jim Congrove became more interesting June 26 when a defendant in the case settled with the plaintiff and agreed to testify against Congrove and the other defendants.

Mike Zinna, a longtime county critic, is suing Congrove, private investigator Daril Cinquanta, former deputy county attorney Duncan Bradley and Robert Cook in federal court. Zinna alleges the men illegally intercepted his personal e-mails and posted them to a website used to defame Zinna.